Here Are The Western Retailers That Source Clothes From The Bangladeshi Factories Where More Than 200 Workers Died

Quartz | By Gwynn Guilford

The eight-story factory building just outside Dhaka that collapsed yesterday has now killed at least 228 workers, reports Reuters—most of them women. The death toll has climbed as an unknown number of people remain trapped in the rubble.

It’s not just the managers that made terrible judgment calls. The Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI), a labor rights and safety group, cleared operations at two of the five factories in the building, New Wave Style and Phantom Apparels—even though inspectors didn’t happen to visit Rana Plaza (paywall). (The other three Rana Plaza factories are Phantom Tac, Ether Tex and New Wave Bottoms.)

“We check the working conditions at the factory, but we are not construction engineers. We cannot be held responsible for how they build their factories,” Ole Koch, director of Danish retailer PWT, which owns a clothing line called Texman, told Reuters. PWT had bought from a Rana Plaza factory for seven years.

Here are the other companies that sourced from the Rana Plaza factories, based onnews reports and workers’ rights groups, including one with access to documents and labels found at the factory, which shared its list with Quartz:

Wal-Mart, USA

Children’s Place, USA

Dress Barn, USA

Primark, Ireland

Matalan, UK

Bonmarche, UK

Cato Fashions, USA

Tex (Carrefour brand), France

Benetton, Italy

Mango, Spain

Joe Fresh (clothing line at Loblaws), Canada

Industrias Cristian Lay S. A., Spain

Shine (Texman brand), Denmark

Jack’s (Texman brand), Denmark

M. Corona, Italy

Yes Zee, Italy

NKD, Germany

Something similar happened last November, when another Dhaka garment factory that lacked emergency exits caught fire, trapping and killing 112. It later emerged that Wal-Mart continued to source from that factory, despite worrying breaches of fire-safety standards in a 2011 inspection (paywall).

The number of high-profile multinationals involved is enough to suggest that a good few corporate ethical trade teams, like those of PWT and the BSCI, gave Rana Plaza a clean bill of health. Those investigations, and the business they encouraged, helpedBangladesh bring in $24 billion in garment exports last year, winning it a spot just behind China as the world’s second-biggest apparel exporter.

The consequences of their oversights will knock Bangladesh back down the exporter list as firms pull orders, lest they risk being associated with Rana Plaza and Bangladesh’s gruesome disregard for worker wellbeing.

A pat on the back for them. But meanwhile, the country’s garment factories are likely to replace the multinationals’ business with even cheaper—and less image-conscious—retailers in more advanced emerging markets. And the life of the Bangladeshi garment worker won’t change much at all.

FYI . . .

Steve Brodner feels he is a newcomer to illustration but that's because he has a really bad memory. Much of his career is worth remembering in any case. Most of it has been about a guy getting to absolutely live his dream; making pictures that make stabs at telling the truth in print about things he feels are important. He is still at it, now moving across platforms, believing, with some justification, that we are all content providers and can now see our ideas shape and get shaped by all manner of media. This site is dedicated to that. And above all, to the best of our imperfect faculties, to telling the truth.

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